


Janus and the Coin

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: (there are no ethics and responsibility guidelines in the apocalypse), Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Global Warming, Growing Up, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Other, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 13:16:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13614144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: He could have been a better person, if only time allowed.





	Janus and the Coin

The beatles dehydrated in the heat.

“It’s unusually hot,” a daycare worker says as Akira’s wailing echoes off the nursery walls, “but this is disgusting.”

The little black bodies coat the floor, curled upon themselves in death throes. Ryo had crushed a few beneath his slippers. He grinds them into the wood while the adults fuss around the supply closet. Akira crouches next to Ryo, weeping into his fists. No one attempts to comfort him. The other children haven’t ventured beyond the foyer, timid and frightened of the scene.

It proves, Ryo thinks, how different Akira is. Despite his excessive emotionalism, he’s the only child who is able to get beyond the primal fear of death. 

The daycare workers shuffle about, sweeping and dumping the corpses into the bin. They attempt to restore some normalcy by putting on anime to entice the children into the play area. It works, especially after they take out biscuits. The children are sufficiently mollified, even happy. This is fun part of the daily routine. Only Akira sniffles, unmollified by the blatant bribery. 

“No one cares,” he whimpers as Ryo reads through an astrophysics textbook. 

“No,” Ryo agrees, examining the model of a two planetary system orbiting a drawf star in a figure-eight. 

“Mean,” Akira weeps, clutching Ryo’s shirt sleeve. “That’s so _mean_.”

 

It is later, after Jenny takes over his care and he is on his masters, that Ryo remembers the beatles. The hot summer day, the crunch of the corpses, Akira crying on his shoulder. It is not a terribly unusual memory aside from the circumstances. Sitting in his pajamas with his laptop on his knees, Ryo looks up at the ceiling and considers why he would remember it at all.

Memory is fallible. It is coloured by sentiment. Ryo knows that he is just as prone to sentiment as anyone else. He is flesh and blood as his scraped knees, papercuts, and broken nails have proven. He registers pain and pleasure within the statistical norm. He feels strongly and deeply, no matter his fluid, smooth exterior. His memory of Akira, the beatles, the wetness that Akira’s tears and snot left on his sleeve:

Humans are sentimental, fallible creatures. Ryo is human. 

Akira proves it. 

 

While Ryo pursues his PhD, he and Akira switch from long but sporadic phone calls to communicating almost exclusively via text. 

It is easier with the time difference, which matters more for Akira, who has started middle school and keeps normal hours. Ryo, now long beyond needing to bow to society’s notions of how to spend the day, likes it because he can send Akira messages whenever. They go back and forth sometimes once a day but more often in bursts when they catch each other at the same time. 

“Who are you talking to?”

Ryo suppresses a scowl. He sets his phone face down on the lab table, leveling a dull eye at his labmate, Patricia, beside him. She smiles, still thinking even after all they’ve done that he’s naive and impressionable. She doesn’t understand that she is an experiment to Ryo, just like all the other subjects in the lab. 

No matter how intelligent, humans are sentimental, fallible, foolish creatures.

“A friend?” she guesses, twisting a lock of hair around her finger and smiling with all the sweet fakeness Jenny’s smile isn’t. “Back in Japan?”

Back in Japan, people will say, like he is actually from there. With his name, he doesn’t blame them. The more humans he meets, especially now that he’s passed out of being categorised primarily as a child, the more he comes to understand how humans need to compartmentalise and label everything around them. Things that are different cause anxiety, and the bigger the difference, the greater the disturbance.

Ryo is human. He is no different.

The centrifuge beeps. He moves closer. Picks up his gloves. She giggles a little and turns back to the surgery. Blades shine, sterile and pristine and ready for use.

Ryo wonders if Akira would cry, if he knew what the pursuit of knowledge entailed.

 

Ryo graduates at twelve, his research a breakthrough in understanding the evolution of the human amygdala. His viva committee sit with him for twenty minutes, asking perfunctory questions as relevant as the weather, before passing him with no corrections. His name sits as first author of the paper in _The Journal of Neuroscience_. He translates the paper into Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, and French himself for further distribution. 

“Amazing,” people breathe as they shake his hand.

“Inhuman,” they whisper as soon as his back is turned.

He doesn’t correct them. They are free to categorise and label him as they like, limiting their understanding and stymying their capacity to adapt and change. Ryo sits on the plane as he moves to his professorship in America, head resting against Jenny’s shoulder and phone open to Akira’s latest message.

 _Congratulations!_ Akira had sent, followed by eight exclamation marks.

Ryo wishes that Akira would get a smartphone so that they could continue to chat even while traveling, but that isn’t Akira’s choice. His parents are off on another of their medical missions, and Akira isn’t flush with money in the same way Ryo is. Money is the carrot and stick of society, and Jenny has been a wonderful teacher in teaching.

 _There’s no better teacher than the avarice of others_ , she agrees.

She cards her fingers through his hair like she used to every night when Ryo came into her care. Ryo lets his phone screen go black. Lets his eyelids grow heavy. Her heart beats in its odd, pat-thump-thump pattern beneath his ear. Around them, the phone drones, the lights dimmed to discourage passenger awareness. Stuck in a flying tube with nowhere to go:

Hell is other people.

It is not a philosophical observation. It is a fact. People are never satisfied, always wanting more. More money, more things, more love, more time. They seek to assuage their anxieties about differences and changes with their greed, and it is all a vicious cycle that at tears them and allows demons to fester prey upon their flesh. It is an animal need at the heart of the human brain stem as integral to basic function as hunger and sleep.

Ryo curls his fingers into fists and shuts his eyes.

 

Time flows onwards relentlessly. 

Ryo feels like he is treading water. He has research, papers, lectures, assistants, students, admirers. Books deals, brand deals, speaking engagements, television and radio spots. Humans fail to surprise him, and Ryo has an endless list of explanations as to why. 

It disappoints him, sometimes, that humans are such simple creatures after all.

That disappointment proves his own humanity. He finds himself oddly empty in moments when his phone has no notifications from Akira. They message more sporadically nowadays as Akira has clubs, friends, and Miki Makimura. Ryo understands and knows that Akira needs to have these things, the societal markers of an adolescent. He is not extraordinary in the way that Ryo’s mind marks him. 

But he is extraordinary. Just different. Ryo understands this now. Only Ryo can understand the depth of Akira’s extraordinariness because he has evidence not just in memory but in their chat and text histories. Akira expresses sentimentality completely without avarice, his outbursts the same as when he wept for the death of beatles and the cruel indifference of others. He is just as sentimental, fallible, and foolish as all humans, but he has none of the avarice that poisons other human beings.

“What do you do in your free time?” 

The studio lights are bright and harsh and make the interviewer’s layers of foundation look like stucco. Ryo smiles a little smaller, a little more shy. He knows the camera is following the change, tiny adjustments to best play up the drama for the late night talk show.

“I am a normal fifteen-year-old in that,” he says, almost like he wants to laugh but shyer for the impulse. 

“Ooh,” the interviewer cooes before chuckling as Ryo returns eye contact. “You do have a reputations for being hands on.”

Disgusting, Ryo thinks suddenly, unbidden and furious. It takes him aback, the intensity of the thought. It is only his natural phlegmatic exterior that prevents anyone from realising anything is amiss. Jenny turns her face to him when he gets into the apartment.

_You are upset._

He is. He is very upset, and, for the first time, he doesn’t know why. Jenny looks at him standing in the foyer. Watches him toeing his shoes off. Her gaze burns as he puts them away.

_Should I stroke your hair?_

Ryo stares at the shoe cupboard. His heart hammers. Adrenaline. Fear. Irrationality. He has only a handful of times when he has felt like this. They all end with Jenny stroking his hair while he looks through pictures of his short childhood days with Akira. 

Memory is fallible.

“After this summer,” he says as Jenny wraps her arms around his shoulders, “I want to see Akira again.”

 

It is impossible to predict the future.

Bleeding, ears ringing, shivering in mud and ash in the Amazon:

Ryo remembers grinding beatle corpses beneath his toes.

 

Narita smells of fuel exhaust, faraway seawater, and the faint, ever present stench of human waste and decay. The sky is dim, lit by the fading moon and the hints of sunrise. Next to him, Jenny carries their bags as they walk to the hired car. Ryo adjusts his coat’s collar, covering the still healing burns.

 _I’m back in Japan_ , he texts Akira, a little slower with his left thumb. _Sorry this is sudden. I wanted to tell you earlier._

 _WHAT_ Akira responds in a flurry of texts that Ryo picks up when he gets out of the bath in his new apartment. _WHEN? TODAY? ARE YOU NEAR TO TOKYO? WHEN CAN I SEE YOU?_

Ryo bites his lip. Swipes and hits the diction function. 

“I am in Tokyo,” he says, and he knows his voice reveals too much; the text hides it for him. “I have to get settled in first. I will come for you.”

Jenny enters after he sends the message, first aid kit in hand. Ryo sits down on the side of the bath as she takes out the antiseptic and sets to work on the worst burns on his upper right arm and the mottled remains of heat blisters in his underarm. Ryo’s phone pings incessantly with overexcited texts.

 _This one is infected,_ Jenny observes as she prods a blister just out of Ryo’s sight; it’s been throbbing badly since before they got on the plane. 

“Drain it,” Ryo agrees, reaching with his good hand to pick up the phone.

 _I’m so happy!_ Akira exclaims as the scalpel opens Ryo’s flesh; his teeth squeak with how hard they’re clenched. _There’s so many places I want to show you! You gotta meet Miki and Miko and everyone. They’re so cool! Not as smart as you, but nobody is. Oh, wow, this is the best thing ever!_

Ryo grunts. He looks up from his phone to watch Jenny unwrap a lump of gauze. The slick, pungent smell of infection fills his nose. He wonders if he should take a picture of it. Compare it to his medical texts. Send it to some of his colleagues. Patricia from his postgraduate days now works for her home country’s government, an endless supply of test subjects outside of legal regulation at her disposal. 

If given the chance, she would love to carve open his brain.

_Do you want me to take a picture?_

Ryo hands Jenny his phone. She takes a moment to position the shot and then takes several more. The infection dribbles down Ryo’s back. He should have asked her to take a video. 

“Send them to Patricia.”

_Not Akira?_

It draws a snort from him as he takes his phone back. “He will cry,” Ryo muses.

Over him. Ryo smiles. He imagines what Akira’s face might look like, scrunched up in tears over his phone. He’s seen it on their video calls and in pictures. Sentimental tears, spilled for the pain of others and the casual, petty cruelties of the world. Usually, that sight fills Ryo with a strange warmth. A reassurance. 

The thought of Akira crying over him:

Ryo stares at his phone.

He doesn’t know what to think of that.

 

Sabbath is—

Ryo doesn’t think about it. Not the first time he goes, following the leads through his contacts and after Jenny previews the event. Not the second time or the one after or the handful of dozens of times after that. He texts Akira and writes his newest book. He talks to his agent, his stockbroker, the lady who lives in the flat below him and rarely ever leaves the house. She has a dog, an elderly, hulking thing. It isn’t bothered by Ryo.

“Animals usually hate me,” he tells her as he pats his hand on the broad, white head.

“Jiro is going to die soon,” his neighbor murmurs, and it is plain and unadorned and all the more loving for it. “I’m sure not even the end of the world would bother him.”

“I wonder if animals can become demons,” Ryo says to Jenny when she sets a box of CalorieBuddy in front of him.

She doesn’t respond aside to look at him. Her lack of facial expression doesn’t fail to communicate that it is entirely possible, but she would rather he consume something to keep his body going. Ryo leans around his laptop and looks at the box. It’s maple flavour. He honestly cannot remember if he’s had this flavour recently or not.

 _Original,_ Jenny supplies.

“Ah,” Ryo says, although it doesn’t matter. 

He goes to Sabbath again that evening. Watches the bodies, the drugs, the alcohol. It’s disgusting and boring in its utter predictability. It preys upon human nature and needs no finesse or control. He leans back into Jenny’s chest afterwards, swirling the remains of an energy drink to reverse the spinning emptiness of alcohol.

Whether or not Akira considers him a friend after this:

It cannot be helped.

 

Akira becomes Amon.

It is a human decision on both Akira and Ryo’s parts. Akira doesn’t want to die. Ryo doesn’t want Akira to die either. He wants this, wants Akira to be the one to defy the confines of human nature. It is sentimental and foolish, and there are so many factors that could have gone wrong. That have and will go wrong. The possibilities make Ryo’s heart hammer. Hands shake. Akira howls his tears to the sky.

“Mean!” Akira wails, although he won’t or can’t remember it later. “This is so _mean_!”

It is. Ryo isn’t sorry. Even when he wakes up in hospital, battered but whole with Akira in snotty tears at his side, he is anything but sorry. Jenny doesn’t visit him, too aware that doctors and nurses find her especially unsettling, and Ryo is an adult in every way. His only visitor is Akira, who weeps because of all the responsibilities he wants to shoulder. He still thinks Ryo is his best friend. It’s sentimental, foolish, and all Ryo has ever wanted. 

He can, as Akira appears with a fresh, non-hospital coffee and pouting lips, admit that now. Akira, having subdued the greatest of all demons, is a sight to behold. Able-bodied in an extraordinary way, full and pulsing with life. Blood and flesh wrought together just so that it is a step beyond what is human. Akira’s body is a vessel that barely contains the evidence of the demon inside. If he was anyone else, Ryo would chain him to a lab table. Cut open his brain and dig deeper and deeper until the pursuit of knowledge ends and there is nothing but a husk to trash.

But he won’t. Not Akira. Never Akira.

No.

He could never hurt Akira like that. 

Akira sits hunched over Ryo’s bedside, tears in the corners of his lashes. His bowed head begs to be touched. Ryo’s hands, healing again after only just recovering from the explosion in the Amazon, itch terribly. 

“It’s not your fault,” Ryo assures him for the fifteenth time.

“I’ll fix this,” Akira vows, swiping angrily at his eyes. 

Ryo is not surprised. Nor is he disappointed. Akira sniffles, sobs, and is so very messily, brilliantly human.

“I will,” he vows, tears and snot dribbling onto the bedding. “I’ll protect you.”

Ryo smiles. Reaches out. 

“Yes.” 

He strokes Akira’s hair. Breaks the scabs beneath his bandages. Blood bubbles up. Staining the touch. Leaking through the gauze. 

Akira heaves a great sob into his shoulder. Excessively emotional. Sentimental, foolish, and so very, undeniably real.

Ryo loves him.


End file.
